From alleged poisonings to organised crime, Russia has been getting a lot of bad press lately. But this time the country - or at least, the government - may be in the clear.

The string of crippling distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against Estonia did not appear to be a coordinated attack by one entity within Russia, according to Jose Nazario, senior security engineer with Arbor Networks.

Estonia, a former satellite of the Soviet Union with a population of 1.3m, came under intense electronic attacks around 27 April, jamming up commercial and government websites. The attacks came as Estonia moved a World War II memorial of a statue of a Soviet soldier, igniting fierce protests.

Several Russian-language web forums have information and scripts that would allow others to rig their computers to join in a DDOS attack, which involves sending massive streams of data to a website, causing it to crash. The scripts would cause a computer to send data to a website.

"We see signs of Russian nationalism at work here, but no Russian government connection," Nazario wrote.

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